Medical Imaging is one of the top developments that is changing the way the medical field is looked upon. For example, CT and MRI technology is the one of the most significant medical innovation that is feeding the medical imaging. The advances like these are letting medical practitioners or researchers solve the mystery of various diseases and enable precise treatments. With these advances, the influence of medical imaging on healthcare industry is growing. The usage of medical imaging is growing beyond diagnostics by entering the areas of prevention, research and therapy.

With that, there have been a surge in different modalities which enable capture medical images. The medical images are in the form of DICOM files. With the various options available for producing medical images, lot of medical imaging data is being generated which needs to be stored for subsequent treatment or consultation or research. Some data may be of immediate use or may be used in the future if the disease reoccurs.

There are few vendors in the market who provide archiving of medical images and GE is one of the prominent one. With GE Healthcare Centricity Enterprise Archive one can save or archive the medical image files on IBM Spectrum Scale running on IBM Elastic Storage Server. IBM Spectrum Scale can be configured with IBM Transparent Cloud Tiering which enables to move older or less used files from IBM Spectrum Scale to IBM Cloud Object Storage or any other cloud access supported by IBM Transparent Cloud Tiering. The same medical images or files can be seamlessly restored from the cloud using this solution.

The diagram below is the architecture of the whole solution.

In this solution, GE Centricity Clinical Archive saves the medical imaging data on IBM Spectrum Scale running on IBM Elastic Storage Server and the same data is then transferred in the form of objects using IBM Transparent Cloud Tiering running in IBM Spectrum Scale to IBM Cloud Object Storage. The policies can be written in IBM Spectrum to define which all medical images that need to be transferred to and from cloud.